CentAUR

• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Antarctic; Arctic; The Antarctic; Antarc*; British Antarctic Survey; SCAR; Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.656.1751; http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/187/1/1287grl24641.pdf

[1] The reliability of the global reanalyses in the polar regions is investigated. The overview stems from an April 2006 Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) workshop on the performance of global reanalyses in high latitudes held at the British Antarctic Survey. Overall, the skill is much higher in the Arctic than the Antarctic, where the reanalyses are only reliable in the summer months prior to the modern satellite era. In the Antarctic, large circulation differences between the reanalyses are found primarily before 1979, when vast quantities of satellite sounding data started to be assimilated. Specifically for ERA-40, this data discontinuity creates a marked jump in Antarctic snow accumulation, especially at high elevations. In the Arctic, the largest differences are related to the reanalyses ’ depiction of clouds and their associated radiation impacts; ERA-40 captures the cloud variability much better than NCEP1 and JRA-25, but the ERA-40 and JRA-25 clouds are too optically thin for shortwave radiation. To further contrast the reanalyses skill, cyclone tracking results are presented. In the Southern